By Sergei Khazov
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Union leader Pyotr Zolotaryov outside the factory on August 1 (ITAR-TASS)
TOLYATTI, August 2, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Several hundred workers at Russia's largest automobile plant, AvtoVAZ, walked off their jobs for four hours on August 1 in what they called a warning strike.

Workers at the plant, located in Tolyatti on the Volga River, were demanding that their pay be raised to 25,000 rubles a month ($977). On average, workers at the plant currently earn approximately 10,000 rubles ($390).

"A middle manager at AvtoVAZ makes approximately 3,000-4,000 euros [$4,100-$5,480] a month, or even more. An assembly-line worker -- that is the most tense, the most responsible sector -- makes about 11,000 rubles [$430]," Vladimir Sidorov, a metal worker at the plant, told RFE/RL. "On such a salary I must take care of my child."

Sidorov says he is able to make ends meet because his wife works as a sales clerk and his parents help out with fresh produce they grow at their dacha. "We eat potatoes and macaroni," he says.

Trade-union leaders hoped to rally thousands of AvtoVAZ's 110,000 workers. But union leaders and AvtoVAZ employees said the auto plant's management took measures in advance to intimidate workers out of participating in the strike.

Sidorov says that rumors circulated last week that management planned massive firings if the strike went ahead.

Police Crackdown

Police also arrested union activists prior to the strike.

Pyotr Zolotaryov, chairman of the Unity trade union, says one activist, Anton Vechkunin, was arrested on July 27. But when Zolotarev inquired about Vechkunin at the local police station, he says that officers on duty told him they had no such person in custody.

Zolotaryov also said that Mikhail Doronenko, an activist from the Revolutionary Workers' Party, was detained on July 31 at the Kazan railway station in Moscow as he was attempting to leave for Tolyatti.

Doronenko was attempting to bring 5,000 copies of a special edition of the newspaper "Worker's Democracy" for the strikers. Police confiscated all the copies of the newspaper.